AFTERLIFE

Future Digital Playgrounds for Storytelling and Simulation

1. DOCUMENTATION

This is a temporary full documentation of AFTERLIFE from its first performance in Forum HFMT, Hamburg. I recommend watching in 4k. A high-quality edit with a 3-camera production is currently in the making.

2. INTRODUCTION

AFTERLIFE is a computer game opera by the music and arts duo SLIME. It is performed by 2 players in a staged setting, who control avatars in a video-projected 3D-game universe using motion capture technology. The opera thematizes death and life after death using traditional computer game storytelling devices, such as scripted sequences, cutscenes and respawning. The piece allegorically employs immersive simulation as a postulated metaphysical model for life, death, reincarnation and conscious existence.

This page serves as my final master's thesis for the Multimedia Composition Masters Programme, HFMT. Beyond this, I hope it may shed light and inspire new ideas and projects based on the technologies, inspirations and ideas that were part of making AFTERLIFE.


The text has two main parts:
Firstly, I would like to expand on the production process behind 'AFTERLIFE', and elaborate on the myriad of works, ideas and tools that have influenced the piece. I will also place the piece in a wider artistic context - comparing it to other related contemporary art pieces, drawing lines to key historical pieces and texts, and to current trends in culture and technology.


Secondly, I would like to discuss the implications of game engines and immersive media like VR as contemporary storytelling mediums. I will go in-depth on how narratives in virtual environments and first-person storytelling adopt and integrate techniques  from conventional storytelling mediums, but also a more recent history of computer games and gaming culture. I will then elaborate on the possibilities within this form of contemporary storytelling in virtual spaces, and its potential influence and transformative power on the individual and on society as a whole. I will conclude with my own value statement for such future works.